Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography (review)

Of those individuals elected to the Hall of Fame shortly after it opened, Eddie Collins was probably the least known to the general public. But to baseball insiders he was one of the most respected. At the time of Collins's death in 1950, the controversial Ty Cobb stated that he considered Collins to have been the greatest second baseman of all time.

Collins's career in the American League covered nearly fifty years. He reached the majors in 1906 playing under the assigned name of Eddie Sullivan, a moniker given to him by Connie Mack in order to protect his amateur status for his final year of football at Columbia. From 1906 until he died in 1950, he was player, coach, manager, general manager, and minority owner of baseball teams. He always seemed to be at the right place and time. He emerged as the key infielder on Connie Mack's hundred-thousand-dollar infield and motivated those A's teams to their championships of 1910, 1911, 1913 and 1914. When Mack broke up that team and needed the cash to start over, Collins was sold to Chicago to play for Charles Comiskey. The White Sox had not been successful since 1906, and Collins was the first of the key acquisitions that made the 1917 and 1919 championships teams possible.

Collins remained part of the White Sox clique known as the "clean Sox" through those years (along with Ray Schalk, Red Faber, and lesser known others), although Huhn raises vital questions about Collins's participation in the controversial Labor Day Detroit series scandal of 1917. Collins stayed with Chicago through the mid-1920s, eventually managing the team to middling success, before he returned to Philadelphia as player then player-coach for those power-filled A's teams of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Anticipating that he would one day succeed his baseball mentor, Connie Mack, as manager of the A's, he hung on as a coach in Philadelphia until it was apparent that Mack, who like many in the depression needed money, was not going to resign as manager. Collins then took on responsibilities as a minority owner and general manager of the Boston Red Sox when Tom Yawkey purchased the team.

Collins helped to rebuild a floundering franchise, steering the Yawkey money in a positive direction on the ball field. He played a key role in signing a young slugger from San Diego, Ted Williams. Less fortunately, he also kept a tradition alive with the Red Sox when he had several black players, including Jackie Robinson and Sam Jethroe, work out for the Sox but refused to sign any of them. Robinson's success with Brooklyn and Jethroe's with the Boston Braves did not deter the Red Sox, who, of course, refused to sign an African American player until signing the ill-fated Pumpsie Green in 1959, a decade after Collins's death.

Huhn's biography does a sound job with Collins's career. Collins clearly emerges as one of the more profound players of the deadball era, a strong leader of teams, and a well educated baseball man. As a college-educated player, he was often regarded as an aloof person on both the A's and the White Sox. While playing next to Chick Gandil on the right side of the White Sox infield, Collins and Gandil never had a conversation.

Collins played smart baseball and clean baseball, a thinking man's game. He hit for high average and stole bases. Few players of that era were pure; they were in the game to make money, more money than the common working person, or even the typical professional (like Collins, with a Columbia degree), could have made. They were professionals seeking advantage, victory, and financial success.

Collins achieved those goals. While not a man of wealth at the time of his death, he was clearly a man of means who had invested well, had not suffered greatly from the depression, found his opportunities, and...